


Echoes, Silence, Patience, & Grace

by luninosity



Category: X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men (Movies), X-Men - All Media Types, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Epic, Fix-It, Happy Ending, Heartbreak, Implied Sexual Content, Knitting, Love, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Post-Movie(s), Reconciliation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-30
Updated: 2012-10-30
Packaged: 2017-11-17 10:01:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/550369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Otherwise known as The One With The Knitting. Flirting, kissing, mostly off-screen sex, heartbreak, loneliness, reconciliation, love. Erik learns to knit. Then they live their lives. Eventually, at the end, someone makes a proposal. And there is, despite indications to the contrary in section two, a happy ending. Of course there is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Echoes, Silence, Patience, & Grace

**Author's Note:**

> Title this time is from a Foo Fighters album title; section headings are all from different songs off this album. Guess them all, and you...win a prize? I don't know, what would you like?
> 
> The sentence that Erik quite appropriately mocks in the last section comes from one of my own academic publications. 
> 
> Also, there are two alternate title possibilities. The first is “Morning Rain,” courtesy of “Live Forever” by Oasis: _lately, did you ever feel the pain/ in the morning rain/ when it soaks you to the bone…_ The second is “Your Stone,” courtesy of “Roll Away Your Stone” by Mumford & Sons: _it seems as if all your bridges have been burned/ you say that’s exactly how this grace thing works/ it’s not the long walk home that will change this heart/ but the welcome I receive at the restart_

1\. _come on over, brave my storm/ oceans overhead_  
   
“You want me to do what?”  
   
“I was perfectly clear, wasn’t I?”  
   
“I heard all your words, yes. That does not mean you were anywhere in the vicinity of clear.”  
   
“I think you should learn to knit,” Charles says again, and holds up a shiny pair of knitting needles as if they should be some sort of invitation.  
   
Charles is sitting, with bare feet tucked up under him for warmth, on the sofa beneath the window, and a late-morning thunderstorm is billowing down in sheets across the glass behind him, a perfect backdrop to his cheerful blue gaze when Erik looks at him across the chessboard. The fire is doing its valiant best to defend them from the cold, and the lamplight, turned on against the chilly greyness outside, spills cozy shadows in unexpected places around the room.  
   
Erik'd had other plans for the morning, vaguely involving a desire to finish their chess match as quickly as possible and subsequently take Charles back to bed and keep him there, all warm skin and sleepy kisses beneath the sound of the rain, but two minutes ago Charles had jumped up and said “Oh, I’ve got something for you, hold on!” and had run out of the room, leaving Erik blinking bemusedly after him.  
   
The something, apparently, has now proved to be knitting needles.  
   
“They were my grandmother’s,” Charles says, as if that helps matters in any way.  
   
“I’m really not your grandmother, Charles.”  
   
“Yes, and that’s definitely a good thing. Listen, we decided that you need to work on fine-tuning your control, right? Small items, precise movements, those are sometimes harder than brute strength and large objects, correct?”  
   
Charles actually has a point, even though Erik hates to admit it, because there’s a very good chance that if he agrees, knitting needles will play a large part in his future. “Yes…”  
   
“Well, then. Make me something.”  
   
“Did you buy me yarn, as well?” Maybe Charles forgot that small detail. And then they can go back to bed and he can try to make Charles forget about the rest of this plan, too.  
   
“I did.” Charles pulls a skein of something blue out from under the couch, with a triumphant flourish, and throws it across the table at him. Erik plucks it out of the air one-handed and examines the tangle of color dubiously.  
   
“I really don’t know how I feel about this, Charles.”  
   
“I feel wonderful about this,” Charles says. “You can make me gloves. Or a scarf. I’d be happy with a scarf.”  
   
“Why,” Erik asks the rain, “am I in love with someone who is _certifiably insane?_ ” The drops patter against the windowpane in happy, but unhelpful, answer.  
   
And Charles grins at him. “So you’ll try?” _You really don’t have to; we can think of something else if you’d like. I just thought it might be fun._  
   
“I suppose I can make an attempt…” _I’m only doing this for you._  
   
 _I know. I love you._  
   
 _I love you, too._ With only a thought, he snatches the knitting needles out of Charles’s loose hold on them. “Did you say I needed to work on precise movements?”  
   
“Yes, why—”  
   
Erik uses one of the needles to, very carefully, detach the first button on Charles’s shirt from protesting threads. “Is that precise enough for you?”  
   
“Erik, I like this shirt.”  
   
“Too bad.” Second button.  
   
“Stop that.”  
   
“Then take it off.” _You wanted me to learn to use these, did you not?_  
   
“Now?” _Well, yes…_  
   
“Now.” _Bedroom, then. Also, bring the yarn_.  
   
Charles starts laughing, even though he ends up losing the rest of the buttons before they make it to the bedroom.  
   
Erik’s first attempt at a scarf turns out more lumpy than the scones Sean once tried to make for Charles’s birthday, and when they both stop snickering, Charles proclaims that he’ll wear it anyway. Erik, horrified, says, “You will _not_ , I can do better,” and hides it in the back of the closet after Charles goes to sleep.  
   
Charles finds it again and wears it around the mansion, and Erik glares at it every time it catches his eye. He _can_ do better. He’s not going to be defeated by knitting needles and yarn.  
   
The second one is, indeed, better. Less lumpy. More scarf-like. Charles nods in approval, and then says, “Can I have socks next?”  
   
“We’ll see.”  
   
The socks are easier, except for the heels, which give him some problems. But that’s more a matter of refusing to give in and look up instructions, not of his technique.  
   
He goes back to scarves and starts trying to make patterns. Stripes. Designs. Abstract art. He starts taking requests, and in a surprisingly short time everyone at the mansion ends up with a scarf or socks or wooly hat or gloves of Erik’s design. They’re even willing to wear these things in public, which he can’t help being just a little proud of.  
   
He makes a scarf for Charles that’s covered in impossibly tiny pineapple shapes. It’s tricky, needing multiple colors and almost invisible stitches. One or two of the pineapples come out a little crooked, but overall they’re both pleased with it, especially when Charles thinks up creative uses for it later that night.  
   
He runs out of yarn, and Charles buys him more, in shades of blinding pink and pumpkin orange, because Charles has a diabolical and twisted sense of humor. Erik gets revenge by making a present for him, in the form of fingerless gloves with brilliant and uneven pink and orange stripes.  
   
Charles, upon receipt of them, immediately yanks off his storebought pair and replaces them with Erik’s vivid offering and declares that they’re the best article of clothing he’s ever owned. When he wears them to dinner, the children stop talking just to stare at his hands.  
   
“Aren’t they lovely?” Charles says brightly. “Erik made them for me.”  
   
The stares swivel, as one, toward Erik, who, not to be outdone in the war of embarrassment, points out, “Yes, Charles, but _you_ picked out the colors,” and listens with satisfaction as Raven starts asking Charles how long he’s had a hidden passion for hot pink.  
   
Charles leaves his newly acquired gloves on all evening, and then, much later, only them and nothing else. He swears that they’re responsible for the record-breaking number of certain enjoyable occurrences. Erik, exhausted, laughing, says, “One more time, then?” and promises him ten more pairs, fifty, a hundred, if Charles wants them, if Charles will do that amazingly clever thing with his tongue again.  
   
Charles does. Erik, in the morning, under the shimmering drizzle of rain against the windows, starts work on a second pair of fingerless gloves.

  
   
2\. _forever gone without a trace/ your horizon takes its shape_  
   
After Cuba, Erik doesn’t know what to do with the knitting needles.  
   
Before Cuba, before they’d left, Charles had tossed them at him, grinning, with a “For luck, hmm?” Erik had laughed, and carefully woven them into the fabric of his brand-new shiny suit, in between the inner and outer linings, over his heart.  
   
He’d had them with him when he’d killed Sebastian Shaw. When he’d made a choice.  
   
They’d been shouting at him, the same familiar loved and loving voice that he heard pleading with him out of Charles’s thoughts. But the cold metallic rage of his coin had shouted more loudly.  
   
He doesn’t regret killing Shaw. The world is better off without such a monster in it and Erik has no trouble forgiving himself for that death.  
   
But he’d made a _choice_. His coin over Charles’s knitting needles. Sometimes, late at night, every time it rains, in the empty spaces between each heartbeat, he can’t forgive himself for that.  
   
Charles probably can’t either. Erik doesn’t take the helmet off, ever, because he’s clinging to that _probably_. He doesn’t want to find confirmation.  
   
And that’s that. But he keeps the knitting needles, when he finds them still stuck into his suit. He doesn’t even know why, at first. What can he possibly do with them now?  
   
But the nights are lonely. The days are full of planning and scheming and ideas for building an army, readying himself for the fight he knows will be coming. But at night he runs out of things to plan, and there’s no Charles to argue with him or challenge him to a chess match or pull him laughingly off to bed. And the nights are _so_ damn lonely.  
   
The knitting needles feel lonely too, in his hands. And they feel like the closest thing he can get to everything he’s given up.  
   
He doesn’t make a blanket, because that seems like something one would give to an invalid, someone weak and in need of protective fuzzy insulation, and if there’s one thing Charles will never be, it is weak. Erik knows this the way he knows Charles, intimately, in his bones, under his skin. The disagreements which they have always had might have, finally, brutally, torn them apart, but just the fact that they’ve chosen different paths doesn’t make either of them less than strong.  
   
They could be stronger together, of course. They always were. But that’s not an option now, if it ever really was.  
   
He thinks about the years stretching out before them now, and about the brief moments they had together that sit on the other side of the scales, before a beach and a submarine and an ending and a beginning. The two sides will never balance. It isn’t fair. It isn’t going to change.  
   
Eventually, he makes a single pair of fingerless gloves. Because Charles should never have cold hands.  
   
The yarn he picks out is dark grey, the color of rain or tears or regret or serenity or sorrow. He drops the package into the mail, using a fake return address, on a chilly morning under a sky like a looming avalanche of slate, and walks away without looking back.  
   
Of course that’s not the last time he uses the knitting needles to make something new. There’s no such thing as a last time, between him and Charles.  
   
One early scarf has a pattern of tiny books. Another is covered in chessmen, which Charles apparently takes as an invitation, because this time he sends back a note to one of the fake addresses—not the one on the package—that says, simply, _Pawn to C4_. And that’s how they start playing again, sideways, hesitantly. Only when they can, in between the demands of their complicated and terrible lives, not making any demands on each other. Not making any promises.  
   
They start a new game immediately, each time they finish one.  
   
More scarves. A lampshade cover, just because he can. A fuzzy blue hat, complete with tassel, after Charles loses his hair, and oh how Erik wishes he could see the expression when Charles opens that one.  
   
He always buys the damn yarn, rather than acquire it any more nefarious way, even though that requires a complicated system of false addresses, multiple accounts, and secret delivery points. It’s not like he can just walk into a craft store and make a purchase, these days, after all. But he can’t use Charles’s knitting needles on stolen yarn.  
   
He sends his projects at random intervals, over the years. Never on holidays, that’s too easy, but always at least one somewhere around Charles’s birthday. Always after every time they fight, against each other or together, against some threat that should know better than to challenge the two of them.  
   
After the horrifying ordeal of Onslaught, that terrifying entity given form out of the dark places of both their minds, it takes him a while to make something, to create anything at all. The piece he finally tosses into the mail isn’t shaped like anything in particular, just a ragged-edged square of red and black and yellow spikes and anger and guilt and horror and pain, all the uprooted emotions that they are both feeling. He doesn’t know what Charles will use it for, or what he’ll think, looking at the colliding colors like soul-deep bruises: this is one chilling possibility of the two of them together.  
   
But, when he sends it, he leaves it deliberately unfinished. There’s more to the story, after all.  
   
The day he lets himself be arrested for his war crimes, the day of his trial before the International Court of Justice, it’s raining in the streets of Paris. When the crazed and vengeful children of Baron von Strucker explode into the courtroom it starts raining fire indoors as well, and Charles, inexplicably, unhesitatingly, sacrifices himself to save Erik’s life and Erik holds his hands as Charles asks him to watch over the school.  
   
Erik puts away the knitting needles after that. He just can’t touch them anymore; they hurt, in his hands, with the ache of memories like unfulfilled promises.  
   
But he can’t throw them away; that would be saying goodbye, and he could never say goodbye to Charles. He’s not strong enough for that.  
   
He hides the knitting needles inside the lining of his leather jacket, instead. He can’t see them, there, but they’re always with him.  
   
When he learns that Charles is, impossibly, alive, he gets them out again. Their metal feels familiar and comforting against his skin, and they don’t judge him if they end up slightly shiny and wet from what he refuses to call tears.  
   
This time he makes a scarf because he can’t think of anything else; it’s hard enough to think at all. It’s pure, brilliant white. He doesn’t have the right colors, doesn’t have the words, doesn’t have the tidy classifications, for all the things he wants to say, but Charles will understand, he thinks. He hopes. Charles is good at understanding. He always was.  
   
He sees Charles, once, a few weeks after he mails that one, from a distance. They’re on opposite sides of a street in New York City and the rain lifts, just for a moment, just long enough for a glimpse. Charles doesn’t see him looking, which might or might not be a good thing; he’ll never know.  
   
Charles is wearing the white scarf. He looks very thin, but he’s surrounded by his students, both old and new, and he’s smiling at them, explaining something that is emphasized by the movements of his hands through the pauses in the rain. Maybe he’s happy. Erik can’t tell.  
   
The clouds open up again, drenching the city and turning the streets into shiny black and yellow swimming pools, and all the pedestrians scramble for shelter. Erik doesn’t move, but by the time the sidewalks clear, Charles and his students are gone.

  
   
3\. _I am not alone, dear loneliness/ I forgot that I remember this_  
   
He flips on the television one cold damp evening and sees Charles, in perfect focus, talking to a room full of important people amid a flock of insatiable news cameras. He’s being introduced as a “mutant expert,” which Charles probably hates; Erik can tell he’s annoyed, can see the line at the corner of his expressive mouth, but Charles still manages to respond politely to any and all questions put to him, and by the end of the interview he’s charmed every single person there. The news anchor, smiling through her commentary, even calls him “wonderful.” He is that, Erik thinks.  
   
The camera zooms in as Charles starts to leave, close enough to catch the pattern on the scarf he’s wearing, and Erik’s heart skips a beat, because it’s one of his. One of the oldest ones, the one with the crooked pineapples. It doesn’t quite match Charles’s designer suit and he knows that Charles doesn’t care about that.  
   
Charles looks up, at the camera, and smiles as if he knows Erik is watching. In response to a final question Erik didn’t hear, he says, “I believe that we can, and must, co-exist, despite our differences. We can only move forward—we can only build a future—if we recognize that we are stronger together, precisely because we are _not_ each of us the same.”  
   
And then he says, “Thank you,” and leaves with the President of the United States, who is looking at Charles like he’s discovered the most rare and beautiful treasure on Earth. It’s a sentiment Erik, suddenly completely alone in his room with the silvery sounds of rain now echoing down from the roof, can’t help but share.

  
   
4\.   _someone to cover/ safe from the rain_  
   
Abruptly he’s tired of all of it. Tired of fighting. Tired of watching Charles go on without him.  
   
He’s tired of pretending that he doesn’t want the life they could have, should have, had, if they hadn’t each been so stubbornly convinced of their own rightness for so many years. They’ve fought each other, loved each other, betrayed each other, saved each other’s lives, done things to and for each other that have left them both battered and scarred, broken and forgiven, and they still orbit around each other because that gravitational pull is irresistible. They are still the most important people in each other’s lives, ever and always, and, Erik thinks, it’s about damn time someone said so.  
   
There’s no big pivotal event to prompt it. There’s not an earthquake or apocalypse or landmark to throw a spotlight on the moment of realization. There’s just a decision he should have made years ago.  
   
And it’s a simple decision, despite, or maybe because of, the fact that it’s taken so very long.  
   
This time he makes something he’s never made before. Two of them, actually. They’re very small, which might’ve been a challenge at some earlier date but by now is simple. Circular. Identical. Made out of yarn flecked with gold.  
   
Rain is falling, of course, when he arrives at the mansion, where Charles is living again these days. Early morning rain, the kind that will probably burn off any minute, but for now it shrouds the world in cool blankness and hidden possibilities.  
   
He can still get past the inadequate security far too easily. Most of the active X-Men have moved out, for various complicated reasons, even though they still come around almost every day, and Charles evidently hasn’t bothered to upgrade the defense systems of late.  
   
Erik thinks that he might be able, if Charles would like, to help with that. If things go as planned, he might be here for a while.  
   
If things go as planned. He’s under no illusions. Charles might close the door in his face or send him away or, just possibly, send someone to land the jet on him. These are all possibilities, though admittedly Erik is hoping for something a bit better. Charles wore the pineapple scarf on national television and spoke about reconciliation, and that has to mean something, right?  
   
The rain feels icy, when it slides under his collar and along his skin. He shakes his head to try to dislodge the drops, and only succeeds in getting more down his back. He hopes that’s not some sort of omen.  
   
Charles wore the pineapple scarf on national television, but maybe that doesn’t mean what Erik thinks it means. What he wants it to mean. Maybe Charles had just run out of expensive scarves that morning and grabbed one at random.  
   
Several of the younger children, not anyone he recognizes, are playing in the misty green grass beside the house, ignoring the rain. The rules of the game seem to be complicated, involving two balls, hoops on sticks, and vigorous discussions about whether or not dematerializing the smaller ball mid-flight counts as cheating. They glance in his direction, but either don’t know who he is, or decide he isn’t a threat.  
   
Erik smiles a little. It’s been a long time since someone looked at him _without_ thinking about him as a potential threat. Of course, usually he’s not calmly walking up to the front door, carrying a package, as if he has every right to be there. It’s confusing enough for him, let alone any spectators.  
   
He wonders how Charles thinks about him, now, and his fingers tighten, just a little bit, on the box. They leave dents, and he’s instantly sorry.  
   
He makes it to the front steps, and stands there wondering what he should do, while the rain bounces messily off his jacket, trickles down his sleeves, and makes echoing noises against his helmet. Should he knock? Should he just pick the lock, sneak in, and try to find Charles without anyone noticing? Should he leave the box to the ravages of the rain, and run away?  
   
From behind him, a voice says, “Were you planning to come in, Erik, or just engage in a staring contest with my door?” And he spins around, meets amused blue eyes, and freezes.  
   
The clouds choose this moment to release an extra-ferocious splattering of drops. Charles, who is also being rained on, seems unperturbed by this fact.  
   
“You—I was going to—why are you out here?” Somehow this has completely upset the precise ordering of the plan in his head. Trust Charles to do that.  
   
“I do venture outside occasionally. Besides, I could see you from the window; you weren’t precisely being stealthy. Is something wrong?”  
   
“No… And I’m not always stealthy. I can be not stealthy. I’m perfectly capable of not being stealthy.” He’s distracted; Charles is wearing a pair of fingerless gloves that look very old, very colorful, and very familiar. They still seem to fit as well as Erik remembers. “Are those…”  
   
“Clearly I have underestimated your capabilities as regards non-stealthiness, all these years. And yes, they are. They’re still quite comfortable.” Charles wiggles fingers at him in demonstration. Erik is captivated, all over again, by the elegance of his fingers in motion. “I don’t wear them out in public, of course—I think the children would feel some concern over my fashion choices—but I do still love them.”  
   
I love you, Erik almost says out loud. “Non-stealthiness isn’t a word, Charles.”  
   
“Ah, you’ve come here to correct my vocabulary. How very thoughtful of you.”  
   
“Well…apparently someone needs to. Did you actually write the phrase ‘our narratives are shaped by desire, by satisfaction, and by pleasure’ in a published book?” Charles grins at him for that, and the rain, as if paying attention, chooses that moment to taper off into a kind of serene drizzle.  
   
“You read my book?”  
   
“I’ve read all your books.” They were the closest he could get, sometimes, to hearing Charles’s voice in his head again. He has two copies of some of them, just for that reason.  
   
“I never knew that.”  
   
“I … never told you.” Somehow he’d always thought Charles would just… know. Which, he now realizes, makes no sense at all.  
   
“No, you didn’t.” Charles raises an eyebrow at him, and Erik wants to kiss him. Everything is out of order, all his plans for this moment falling away, and somehow he doesn’t mind at all. “It’s not the sort of topic that generally comes up in our conversations, you must admit. But it is flattering.”  
   
Flattering? “Well, then…” He’s not quite sure where that sentence is going, and Charles is smiling at him, sunlight suddenly fraying through the clouds. He wants to know what Charles is thinking. He wants Charles to know what he’s thinking. They’ve known each other inside and out and it’s not like he has any secrets left to keep, anyway.  
   
He yanks off the helmet without touching it and throws it to one side. It rolls down the hill and ends up, absurdly, stuck in some wet bushes. It can sit there forever, for all he cares.  
   
Charles whispers, “Erik,” and his voice shakes, just a little. He’s not immune to the moment, either. Good.  
   
“Erik,” Charles says again, “are you—can I—”  
   
“Wait,” Erik says, and then, “I’m sorry,” because it needs to be said, and then, “I have something for you first. A surprise. If you want it.”  
   
“If I…of course I do. What is it?”  
   
“Here.” He hands over the box, carefully. He’s never really learned to wrap presents, some sort of terrible omission in his supervillain career, but he is methodical, and every inch of the box has stayed pristine and white and crisp. Except, of course, for the finger-shaped indentations he accidentally made a few moments ago and now regrets wholeheartedly.  
   
Charles takes off the lid. Looks down. Is silent.  
   
A single sunbeam, with a finely-tuned sense of narrative timing, shoots down from parting clouds and reflects rainbows into the misty air around them. It’s too perfect to be real, and Erik thinks that something must be going to go wrong any minute now, and why hasn’t Charles said anything yet?  
   
Charles starts to smile, slowly. Erik has been holding his breath and his lungs are starting to hurt from lack of oxygen but he can’t remember how to fill them at the moment.  
   
Charles picks up one of the tiny yarn rings, looks at it in the solitary sunbeam, looks at Erik. “You made two?”  
   
“Yes…”  
   
“One for each of us?” The gold in the yarn sends glinting broken light across Charles’s fingers. The sun is trying valiantly to come out and be a part of their moment.  
   
“Yes. Do you…” …like them? Want one? Want me? He doesn’t know what words to choose, what phrases might complete that sentence and let it complete them. What sounds can possibly be enough for everything he wants to say?  
   
Charles, very carefully, pulls off his left glove, slides the ring he’s holding over the tip of one particular finger, and all the way down along pale skin to the place where it’s meant to go. He says, “That’s amazing, you’ve even got the size right,” and he looks up, and holds the other one out, and grins. “I think you need yours, then?”  
   
Erik takes it, automatically, and their fingers brush, and he says silently, _I’ve missed you_.  
   
Charles hesitates. _Did you mean for me to hear that?_  
   
 _Yes._ He’s always been taller than Charles, regardless of wheelchairs and legs and other intervening factors, but right now, for this, he doesn’t want to be, so he gets down on both knees in the wet grass and looks up to meet Charles’s gaze.  
   
 _You can hear anything you want. You can HAVE anything you want, from me. Anything_. The grass is cold and the damp chill of it is soaking through his pants and it doesn’t matter because Charles reaches out, then, and takes his hand. Their fingers fit together, not the same way he remembers, because they’ve grown older with the years, but still like coming home.  
   
“Charles,” he says out loud, and then, _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’ve missed you, I’ll leave if you want me to, or I’ll stay forever, just tell me, please, tell me what you want from me._  
   
Charles looks at him with those brilliant blue eyes, that impossible color that Erik never could quite find yarn to match, and says, still smiling, “You made us matching rings.” _I think a certain specific question often comes with that, if I’m not mistaken?_ His mental voice matches the smile, and Erik feels hope tap like the vanishing raindrops against his heart.  
   
 _You—are you saying—do you want me to ask you to marry me?_ He will. In a heartbeat. If Charles means that.  
   
 _I think that might be appropriate, yes, don’t you?_ And Charles is actually laughing, just a little bit. It’s not really amusement; it’s all astonished delight, the trembling edge of crazy irrational happiness and a kind of giddy immanence and the sudden overwhelming knowledge of _love_. All of that is in Erik’s head too, making him want to laugh as well, and there are no spaces left between them anymore, because all the spaces are filled up and spilling over with joy.  
   
 _It’s not as if I’ll say no_ , Charles adds, apparently just because he wants to make sure Erik knows this. But Erik’s already found that there’s no room left for doubt.  
   
 _Well, then…_ He clears his throat, and tries to form words. This is something that should be said out loud, with the mist and the air and the damp ground as witnesses. “Charles,” he says, and runs a finger along the yarn where it rests on Charles’s skin, “will you marry me?”  
   
Charles answers, promptly, “Yes,” and _yes_ sneaks its corresponding way into Erik’s thoughts, accompanied by a wave of absolute and utter certainty.  
   
Erik echoes “…yes?” because despite hearing it in every possible way he still can’t quite let himself believe it, and Charles shouts _“YES!”_ in his head and out loud, loud enough to fill the entire world with affirmation.  
   
Heads pop out of every single window in the mansion in response, and curious murmurs scatter down through the air like falling leaves.  
   
“…who?”  
   
“Don’t be stupid, you know who that is…”  
   
“All right, but why—”  
   
“What are they doing?”  
   
“…oh, _that’s_ what they’re doing. Come on, act like adults, stop doing that in public…”  
   
“Well, they _have_ missed each other.”  
   
“They look happy. Don’t they look happy?”  
   
“I’m not looking.”  
   
“…took them long enough, frankly.”  
   
“Agreed.”  
   
 _Agreed_ , Erik thinks, and Charles kisses him as if trying to make up for everything, a wordless apology for all the time they’ve lost, and a promise of everything they might have yet to come. Someone whistles at them from a second-story window, and Charles, without moving his happily occupied mouth, shouts at the mansion, _Shut up, you voyeurs!_ and laughter tumbles down on them in return.  
   
 _I’ll buy you more yarn,_ Charles says.  
   
 _I’ll make you more fingerless gloves._  
   
 _Is that a promise?_  
   
 _Yes._  
   
 _I love you._  
   
 _I love you, too._   Erik pauses for a second, thinking. “If you want real wedding rings I can—”  
   
 _Certainly not! I love these._  
   
 _I love YOU, have I mentioned that?_  
   
 _Yes, but I think you should say it again…_ Charles pulls him back into the kiss. The knitting needles, which are safe in Erik’s jacket pocket, sing gleefully at the edge of his senses.  
   
Up above, the morning rain comes back with sudden impatience, drenching them both. This time it splashes comfortably over them, like a familiar heartbeat, like a welcome home.


End file.
